Chapter Twenty-One
I’m fine, Wally, really,” Nate said. “I’m just pissed off.”
“Well that may be, but it doesn’t change the anatomy of the human body,” Wally responded. “Now sit still.”
After being attacked in his room, Nate and Wally alerted hotel security, who called the Polizei.
Both men gave a statement and Nate gave a weak description of the suspect, and the police left them to their own devices.
Wally insisted that Nate bunk in his room as he had two queen beds.
He had also insisted on playing medic and checking him out physically.
Nate had agreed to the first request and moved his things over but had been forced to comply with the second. He felt fine, just sore. And as the adrenaline wore off, he felt tired and frustrated. Wally refused to take no for an answer and was addressing several cuts on his face and head.
“Any idea what he hit you with?” Wally asked. Nate’s forearm was already starting to bruise.
“Something fucking heavy. A towel rack, I think.”
Wally just grunted. “So what do you think? Robbery? Target of opportunity?”
“No way.” Nate shook his head. “This guy was trained. A few more seconds and he would have had me.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean anything,” Wally said, grinning. “Maybe you’re just a shit fighter.”
“Fuck off.” Nate sighed and Wally laughed. “The way he bolted. It was like he had a plan.”
“There’s a lot of good thieves out there. I’ll bet a lot of them plan ahead.” Wally finished applying antiseptic and a butterfly bandage to the cut on Nate’s head before moving down to examine the forearm.
Nate was silent for a full minute. “Do you still leave tells on your door, Wally?”
“Naturally.”
“I left two. He wouldn’t have been able to replace the exterior one, and those are fifty-fifty at best anyhow. But he either replaced the interior one, or scaled the outside of the building to specifically get into my room.”
Wally stopped what he was doing and thought about it for a moment. “Well, that is fucking strange. I think we’re starting to build enough data points to leave the realm of coincidence behind.”
“Right?” Nate shook his head again, confused. Wally seemed to read his thoughts.
“Alright, then. Let’s think about it logically. Why attack you? I mean, you’re a fucking nobody, no offense.”
“None taken,” Nate agreed. “And you’re right. I’m not in the army anymore. I don’t have a long list of international enemies. I’m a graduate student doing research on a fabled city thousands of years old that may or may not have even existed!”
“So you don’t think it exists, then? Guess you’re wasting my time too.” Nate looked up and saw Wally smiling.
“You know what I mean. Of course it exists. I just don’t get it. Why attack me?”
As they mulled it over, a chilling thought came to him. “Isn’t it odd that Richter didn’t show up today?”
Wally caught his drift. “The receptionist did say that it was unlike him.”
“I need my laptop.” He started to stand and Wally stopped him with a hand on his chest before retrieving it for him.
Nate booted up the computer and went to work.
The majority of useful information in the world wasn’t classified, but rather out in the open for anyone to find.
It was where the term OSINT came from, which simply stood for open-source intelligence.
One just needed to know where to look, and fortunately that was a task Nate was highly skilled at after years of targeting bad guys on a Special Forces team.
Within twenty minutes he had Richter’s home address.
“Got it,” he said. “Richter’s house is in town, not too far from here.”
“So when do you want to go? First thing after breakfast?”
Nate shook his head. “Now.”
“Now?” Wally asked incredulously. “It’s the middle of the bloody night. Piss this guy off and he may never give you what you need.”
“If I’m right, and there’s a connection between my research and my attacker,” Nate said, “then tomorrow might be too late.”
The walk to Richter’s house was less than a mile. As they moved along the generally empty streets, both men were on high alert. The same heavy foliage and charming neighborhoods that Nate had enjoyed earlier in the day now seemed menacing in the dark.
Of course it was highly unlikely they would be attacked again.
The police were on alert as to what had happened, and if it was in fact a lone actor then the odds were now numerically stacked in their favor.
Still, it didn’t hurt to be cautious, so they traveled mostly in silence, wary of any perceived threats.
Before long they turned onto Burbacher Strasse.
The long and narrow street featured few offshoots, which meant fewer chances for escape should something go wrong.
They eventually reached the house of Gilbert Richter.
It was dark, with no interior lights visible from the windows.
Nate glanced briefly at the face of his Omega watch, the hash marks for time illuminated in the darkness as the smooth automatic movement caused the second hand to glide over them in an effortless manner. It was nearly midnight.
“Maybe he’s sleeping,” Wally whispered.
“Yeah,” Nate grumbled, “maybe.” He moved forward and rang the bell. Nothing. He rang again, and they waited several minutes. Again, there was no movement. He pounded on the door.
“Could have gone away on a last-minute trip,” Wally suggested.
Nate ignored him. Something felt wrong. He crept over to the window and looked inside, but saw nothing except darkness.
He briefly glanced around and didn’t see any overt cameras on the house or any of the neighboring houses.
It didn’t appear as if security was a concern in these parts, and it made sense.
The police had told him that the area did not have much crime, which is what had made his attack so unusual.
Pulling out his phone, Nate turned on the flashlight and shone it through the window. At first he couldn’t make out anything, but soon he thought he recognized the familiar shape of a body lying on the floor.
“Wally,” he whispered, “come over here and tell me what you see.”
Wally did as he was asked. It took him a few seconds as well before he was able to define what he saw.
“Holy shit, mate,” he whispered. “It looks like someone’s been flat-packed!”
“One way to find out.” Nate removed an item from his wallet. The Grim Workshop key card was the size of a credit card but contained several flattened lockpicking tools, including several picks, rakes, and a tension wrench.
“What are you thinking?” Wally was looking at him quizzically.
“We need to get in there and see what’s going on. He might need help. The same guy that attacked me might have attacked him as well.”
“Then we should call the police,” Wally said.
“And say what? That we crept over to this guy’s house looking for information on a mythical city?”
“Fair point,” Wally conceded. “How do we know it’s not alarmed?”
Nate didn’t see any evidence that the house had an alarm system. “There doesn’t seem to be much security around here. If we trigger an alarm, we’ll run.”
“Good thing I stretched today.”
They had both changed before leaving. Nate had thrown on an olive-colored Barbour Ashby jacket and a pair of dark Prana pants to go with his dark-brown boots. Wally was dressed in similar tones. If they did need to run, they would both be hard to spot in the dark.
Nate moved to examine the lock on the door. It seemed to be a simple pin tumbler lock. He inserted the pick into the keyhole upside down, lifted the pins, and slowly withdrew it, allowing them to fall one by one back into place while he counted.
“Five-pin tumbler,” he whispered.
Defeating locks was something Nate was very good at.
He had been trained in the army to do so, but most of his ability was natural aptitude rather than practiced skill.
Rarely had he met a lock he couldn’t defeat, and a simple one such as this wouldn’t provide much of a challenge, even with the rudimentary lockpicking equipment he was using.
It took less than a minute before he felt the satisfying motion of the lock’s tumbler beginning to turn.
“I’m in,” he whispered.
Nate rotated the lock and quickly withdrew his tools, packing them away.
Pulling his sleeve down to cover his hand he gently pushed down on the handle and slowly cracked the door open.
There was no alarm or sound of any kind.
They waited for two full minutes before opening the door and slipping inside.
In the service it was known as SLLS, which stood for Stop, Look, Listen, and Smell.
It was an opportunity to assess danger when entering a new environment, especially a potentially threatening one.
When they were confident that it was safe to enter, they used the flashlights from their phones to scan the living room directly inside the entrance.
Nate knew immediately that he was right and something was wrong.
The place looked ransacked, with chairs overturned, drawers opened, and random items flung about.
Shining his light down on the floor he saw the body.
It was a heavyset man in a suit who was splayed out in one of the many awkward positions that recently created corpses often found themselves.
It appeared as if his skull had been bashed in, and blood and brain matter had poured from the gaping hole in his head onto the floor. Wally saw it too.
“Fuck me, that’s rank,” the British man whispered, covering his nose with his sleeve.
Nate walked over to a place where he could get a better view of the man’s face.
Based off his profile picture on the organization’s website, this was Richter.
He shone his light around the room once more.
If there was anything useful in this place, or something that could have pointed to the reason its occupant was murdered, it would have been long gone after the thorough job someone had done.
He stepped gingerly back toward the door.
“Let’s get out of here,” Nate said. The two men left the house and he relocked the door on their way out. Then they moved swiftly down the street back toward their hotel. Once they were a safe distance away, they finally spoke.
“I don’t suppose you want to call the police now?” Wally asked.
“I think it would be worse after we broke into a murdered man’s house, don’t you? Besides, they’ll undoubtedly find him in a few days. Speeding up that process won’t make him any less dead.”
“True,” Wally conceded. “So, what the fuck, then? What are the odds that the geezer you came here to meet is murdered around the same time someone tries to kill you?”
“A million to one.” Nate was now certain the two events were connected. A cold chill ran up his spine, and it wasn’t the cool night air. This was the first time he had felt personally hunted outside of a war zone.
“Maybe we ought to bug out and put some distance between us and this place,” Wally suggested.
“No,” Nate countered quickly. “We can’t. At least not yet.”
“Well, why the fuck not?”
“Richter. He’s got to have the information we’re looking for. If not at his house, then most likely in his office.”
“You can’t be serious!” Wally was incredulous. “Now you want to break into the man’s office? There’s got to be a better way to nab survey data on Saudi Arabia.”
“It’s not just about that. Sure, I want the data. But there’s something else going on. Something that Richter died for, and something that caused someone to take a shot at me tonight. If we don’t find out what it is, I’ll never know who is gunning for me or why.”
Wally sighed, and it was evident that he knew his friend was right. “Well,” he said, “we’ve come this far. Might as well go all the way.”
“Thanks, Wally,” Nate said sincerely.
“Cheers,” Wally responded. “So what’s the new plan?”